Christmas Dinner Soup, free of meat (and gloop)

We're now three weeks into 2023, but while the year is no longer really new, I feel it's still just about ok to tell you about a few things I ate over the festive period. Compared to my last post, talking about the Queen's Jubilee some 7 months after it happened, this is almost instantaneous reportage.

Regular readers may recall that in December 2021, I was 'lucky' enough to get my hands on a limited edition tin of Christmas Dinner Big Soup from Heinz, which brought together all your favourite bits of the traditional feast in a sea of gravy. To say I wasn't massively impressed by it would be a bit of an understatement, so when Heinz announced that they would be bringing it back in 2022, I wasn't all that fussed. Well, that's not quite true - I was slightly miffed actually, as this time they were going to be selling it selected branches of Asda, rather than only via their own website, which had meant you had no choice but to pay the postage cost, pushing the price up to around an extortionate £5 (though from memory it did include a donation to a homeless charity, so I musn't grumble.)

The other big change for 2022 was that Heinz also brought out a vegan version, but again I wasn't massively bothered - I am many things, but a vegan is not one of them. One day in late November however, I just so happened to find myself in a large Asda, where they had a good number of tins of the stuff (contrary to reports I'd heard that they were very hard to find anywhere), so I thought I might as well give it a try, as something to write about for a Christmas-themed post, if nothing else. And as I'm writing that post very late, I'm killing two birds with one stone, as this will do for Veganuary too. 

So, what does a Vegan Christmas Dinner in soup form comprise? Some sort of nut roast, or an attempt to do something interesting with an aubergine or a butternut squash? A non-meat turkey substitute, made from textured soya protein, branded as 'Twerkey'?  No - essentially it's the same as the standard version, just with the turkey removed, vegetable rather than chicken stock making up the gravy, and the pigs in blankets replaced with vegan sausages (without any form of blanket for warmth/flavour). And for some reason, there's no red cabbage this time. Otherwise, everything from the non-vegan version is there - sage and onion stuffing balls, parsnips, carrots, potatoes, cranberry sauce and the all-important brussels sprouts - albeit in slightly different proportions.

It's very easy for meat-eaters to be dismissive of vegan and even vegetarian options, and I admit I was half-expecting this version to be more disappointing than the one I tried last year. I'm pleased to say I was wrong. In terms of colour, smell and taste, it felt a lot less like having a big bowl of gloopy Bisto with bits in it, and more like an actual vegetable soup, with a discernible sweet note of parsnip, and a slight tang from the cranberry. Quite pleasant, in fact. The one sprout in the tin was predictably squishy, but at least not foul-tasting. 

The vegan sausages were unlikely to convince any meat-eaters that they were the real thing, with their oddly chewy texture, but the flavour was actually pretty good. Vegan bacon does exist, so perhaps they could have wrapped them in a meat-free 'blanket', but that wouldn't necessarily have made them any tastier. 

The real star of the show for me this time was the stuffing. As with the version I tried last year, there was just the one massive ball in the tin, though it did break down a little on heating in the pan. This time it reminded me of an Austrian Semmelknödel, a sort of bread dumpling that they serve over there with steaming bowls of goulash. I am rather fond of these, having lived in Austria for the best part of a year, so to be transported back to its wood-panelled Gasthauses, albeit briefly, was a treat.

When it came to using the second half of the tin, I decided to put it in a toasted sandwich (made in my stove-top toastie maker), which obviously called for some cheese. I will not be so dismissive as to say that there is no such thing as decent vegan cheese - there may well be, these days - but it being Christmas-time, I had a large quantity of good old reliable Stilton in the fridge, so I was clearly going to use that, which did the job splendidly, but of course was very much not vegan.    

So, while the soup might not have inspired me to go vegan for a day, let alone the whole of January, I am willing to be open-minded about the idea. A Christmas dinner with the meat removed might not sound all that great, but in tinned soup form, it is actually an improvement on the original.